Michelle Bliss

News Director

Michelle moved to the Silver State from North Carolina where she led the award-winning public radio newsroom in Wilmington. During her time down South, Michelle earned two regional Edward R. Murrow awards for her coverage of local politics and the water contamination scandal at Camp Lejeune. She also completed her master's degree in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

When she's not covering a local story, Michelle works on other nonfiction writing projects, which have appeared in literary journals like River Teeth and Ninth Letter.

Ways To Connect

During the Holocaust, people often turned a blind eye to the horrific fate of their Jewish neighbors and acquaintances. But there were also many who took it upon themselves to save Jewish men, women, and children, despite the grave danger it placed upon them and their families. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem--the world's center for researching and documenting the Holocaust--has deemed these heroes as the Righteous Among The Nations. A traveling exhibit to honor them has landed at the University of Nevada, Reno and will be up through August 27th.

Artown is drawing to a close this week, but Reno Public Radio’s Michelle Bliss reports that the community impacts of one project, the Doors To Recovery exhibit, will extend far beyond the month-long festival.

This spring, a team of architecture professors and students partnered with the Nature Conservancy to build a tiny public park covering the area of a single parking space in downtown Las Vegas. The structure is called a parklet and it’s a place where urban and natural worlds collide.

The Nevada treasurer's office heard hours of public comment Friday on a new law that allows families to spend public education dollars on private school tuition.

In the last legislative session, lawmakers approved SB302 which creates a program for education savings accounts. Those accounts will offer families a credit each year that can go toward the cost of a school of their choice. But there's a catch. In order to qualify for the money, students must first be enrolled in public school for 100 days.

A new law is requiring Washoe County and the City of Reno to offer what's called automatic aid for their fire services so that the closest engine responds to a blaze despite jurisdiction. The two are negotiating that now and must have a plan in place by October, but they’re also still fighting in court about their failed merger several years ago.

Democratic Senator Harry Reid says the designation of a sprawling national monument in rural Nevada last week was not part of an effort to fend off a nuclear waste dump. Reno Public Radio's Michelle Bliss reports.

In an interview Monday with KNPR in Las Vegas, the outgoing senator was asked whether the designation of the Basin and Range National Monument was meant to prevent the construction of a railroad that would ship nuclear waste to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

President Barack Obama used executive powers Friday to designate a huge swath of Southern Nevada as a new national monument, but the move has drawn criticism from several local lawmakers. Reno Public Radio's Michelle Bliss reports.

The president's decision will protect more than 1,100-square miles of desert and mountain terrain by creating the Basin and Range National Monument. U.S. Senator Harry Reid and other Democrats are hailing the move as historic.

This is the University of Nevada School of Medicine Health Watch. In this installment, we're talking about medical education expansion at the University of Nevada School of Medicine and the role that Renown Health will play in these efforts. Joining us is Dr. Anthony Slonim, president and CEO of Renown health and University of Nevada School of Medicine dean, Thomas Schwenk. Leading this discussion is Richelle O'Driscoll, director of public affairs for the Division of Health Sciences and School of Medicine.

For the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, preserving cultural traditions involves every generation. Along with capturing the memories of elders, they must also compete for the attention of Native American kids living in a modern world. That’s why there’s powwow club. Reno Public Radio’s Michelle Bliss has more for the final segment of our series Taking Back History.

About a dozen dancers, mostly teens, are in their gym clothes building up a sweat as they furiously step to the beat. They’re getting a workout, but it’s more than that.

Like many Native American tribes across the country, the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony is in a critical state of language loss. Only a handful of colony elders can speak the Great Basin languages of Paiute, Washoe, and Shoshone.

For our series “Taking Back History,” Reno Public Radio’s Michelle Bliss looks at how the colony is trying to save these languages and why they haven’t been passed down.